Maeve Madden adds Spice Girls & Venga Boys to create her Team Queens

Known for her candid, lighthearted social media presence, Irish personal trainer and author Maeve Madden has taken to Instagram during quarantine to motivate her followers to keep moving and to stay positive.

The Newry native and former model has been running bootcamps and appearing at events to give music-based, fun workout classes for some time now, but once pandemic limitation restrictions kicked in, Maeve decided to start hosting daily Instagram live workout sessions for her 217,000 followers.

Speaking to Extra.ie about her Team Queens movement, called after her friends’ nickname for each other, Maeve attested to the importance of taking a community-based approach to fitness on social media, and stressed the extent to which the daily workouts have become a key part of her routine.

Known for her candid, lighthearted social media presence, Irish personal trainer and author Maeve Madden has taken to Instagram during quarantine to motivate her followers to keep moving and to stay positive. Pic: Instagram

Maeve initially intended to return to Ireland during the pandemic, but as both of her parents are more vulnerable to COVID-19 (Maeve’s mother is a cancer survivor and her father has compromised health), she ended up having to stay in London, where she lives with her boyfriend.

This change of plans and the closure of gyms led Maeve to start the Team Queens movement, which has ‘majorly’ grown in the last few weeks.

Maeve said: ‘What I do is, I take the Venga Boys, the Spice Girls, all of those songs from our childhood, and I put routines to them. I’ve been doing these at festivals and events and I said you know what, that’s something that’s so fun, and it’s always super motivating and super empowering and it’s just a bit of craic.

‘You’re dancing but doing a workout, you get super sweaty, you love it. And not everybody has weights at home — my gym had closed and I said well you know what I’m going to run a live class and maybe some people would like to join. So it started off with like 400 and now we have 1,500 people joining in.

‘They’re really good! Every single day now, it’s a lot of the same people, but because I can’t see people’s names and me and my friends always call each other Queens, it kind of turned into Team Queens.

‘So now we have a Team Queens community where everybody is a Queen and does their best and it doesn’t matter if you can do it or not. Louise Cooney joined in on Tuesday for the first time, God love her, and it was just so lovely because everybody was like “Louise, that was me when I first started, I’ve been doing it for four weeks now and I feel so strong”, really encouraging her, and it’s just a very encouraging group of women (mainly women, there are some men in there too) who get together every morning at 10.30, except for Sundays and we just hit up these really fun weekends and it’s smashing!’

Maeve said: ‘Now we have a Team Queens community where everybody is a Queen and does their best and it doesn’t matter if you can do it or not.’ Pic: Instagram

‘I’m exhausted by the end, they’re super sweaty, they’ve been getting harder each week, but everybody seems to be loving them which is fabulous because we’ve grown this community.’

While up to 1,500 people may join in the live workout, 60,000 people from all over the world view Maeve’s videos on a daily basis.

Maeve added: ‘It’s fun because a lot of people will Zoom or Facetime their friends, and they’ll do my workouts, and it’s just a bit of craic. It’s really fun, it’s a really nice community that we’ve created and now that it’s there, I’ll keep it going somehow because we don’t know when gyms will open, and actually a lot of people have said doing those workouts, they’re getting better results than they would have gotten going to the gym.’

While up to 1,500 people may join in the live workout, 60,000 people from all over the world view Maeve’s videos on a daily basis. Pic: Instagram

When asked about how she manages to stay positive and smiling during these challenging times, Maeve asserted: ‘I do it for my Queens, I do it for Team Queens. I love what I do and it puts me in a good mood and I am generally a very lighthearted person.

I don’t really watch the news, my Mum tells me what’s going on, she updates me — we call her CNN Newry or CSI Newry if it’s crime! She tends to update us on what we need to know and I kind of keep it at that.

‘You know what, we’re all in this together, we really are. Everybody is stuck at home in what I like to call Quarantino and you just have to make the most of it. We’re stuck here, we don’t know when we’re getting out, hopefully soon, and we don’t know how life will go forward.

Maeve said: ‘You know what, we’re all in this together, we really are. Everybody is stuck at home in what I like to call Quarantino and you just have to make the most of it. We’re stuck here, we don’t know when we’re getting out, hopefully soon, and we don’t know how life will go forward.’

‘This is kind of our reality right now and you can either sit and sulk about it and be sad, which is going to negatively affect your life, or you can look on the bright side and make the most of it. There’s so many things you can do at home!’

Maeve went on to say: ‘Of course I do have my down days, but I don’t really share my down days online because people come to my page to have a laugh, to have Prosecco, or prosexy as I call it, or to do a fun workout. That’s why people come to my page and during this time especially I’m trying to keep it as positive and fun as I can because we’re all at home, there’s more people viewing Instagram stories and content and so for me it’s my job, it’s important for me to try and make people feel good about themselves and try and make them feel happy.

‘Of course I don’t need to do that, but it makes me feel proud of my job that I can do that and that I can have some kind of positive impact on people’s lives during this time.’

Maeve went on to say: ‘Of course I do have my down days, but I don’t really share my down days online because people come to my page to have a laugh, to have Prosecco, or prosexy as I call it, or to do a fun workout.’ Pic: Instagram

Speaking about what she’s most looking forward to in the post-pandemic world, Maeve said: ‘I’m most excited about going home. I always would have worked between Ireland and the UK, so this is probably the longest time ever that I’ve spent away from home and spent away from my parents.

‘It’s funny because, at the start I was saying I missed sushi, and that I couldn’t wait to have sushi or got out and get an espresso martini, but as time goes on, I just want to go home. You realise you can live without things, it’s mental, you realise you really don’t need that morning coffee because you’re now a coffee extraordinaire making coffee at home.

‘All of those little things — I was even saying to my partner, we would never have done this weekly shop thing, never, we would have run down to shops or ordered Deliveroo and I haven’t ordered takeout in five weeks. And actually, those are things that I don’t miss, those things that I thought I so needed in my life — I’m loving cooking everyday and not eating out and preparing my own meals and I thought before it was so time consuming. It’s such a positive thing to have come from what we’re in right now!

‘The only thing that I do want to do is go home and see my parents, and hopefully the travel bans will be lifted and we will go home.As long as I am home for Christmas, I don’t care if I don’t get home until Christmas, but if I had to choose one time that I would get to go home it would be Christmas. That’s the one thing that I just want to do really is go home and see my parents and friends as well, it’s so weird not being able to go out and grab a coffee and meet people, it’s just so strange.’

Maeve’s Team Queen workouts start at 10.30am every day apart from Sundays, and can be accessed on her Instagram page. Maeve is also the author of Beat the Bloat: Recipes & Exercise to Promote Digestive Health.

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